DevOps Engineer

Job description

About Zinkworks Zinkworks partners with leading Telecommunications and Financial Services organizations to modernize legacy systems, migrate mission-critical platforms to the cloud, and engineer AI-driven automation. From OSS transformation to rApp development and network intelligence, our teams simplify complexity and turn it into competitive advantage. Based in Ireland and operating across the EU, UK, and US, Zinkworks combines deep domain expertise with delivery excellence to help clients modernize faster and operate smarter. The Role Zinkworks is building a small product discovery team developing AI, machine learning, and software capabilities for next-generation telecom networks, taking new product ideas from concept through to working prototypes. We are looking for a Senior DevOps / Platform Engineer to own the cloud and deployment foundations that allow that team to move quickly. You will be involved from day one of new product ideas: helping establish environments, deployment approaches and delivery pipelines before infrastructure becomes an afterthought. You will own our internal product and demo environments, make it easy to spin up new projects, and establish common patterns across products being built by different engineers and using different technology stacks. As ideas mature, you will also help turn prototypes into robust, repeatable and production-ready solutions. This is not a ticket-driven DevOps role. We want someone who brings their own judgement to the team, challenges unnecessary complexity, proposes better approaches, and helps us make good technical decisions early. What You’ll Do Own the cloud and deployment foundations for the product development team, primarily on GCP. Work alongside product, engineering and applied-science colleagues from the beginning of new product discovery, helping teams get from idea to deployed prototype quickly. Design, build and maintain CI/CD pipelines so deploying software becomes routine rather than a manual exercise. Own the setup and management of internal development, test and demonstration environments. Establish reusable patterns for spinning up new projects, reducing the amount of infrastructure work required every time the team starts something new. Help bring consistency to products being developed across different technology stacks without forcing unnecessary standardisation. Design and maintain release pipelines, secrets management and environment configuration. Build and operate Kubernetes-based infrastructure where appropriate. Help troubleshoot difficult cloud and infrastructure problems and, more importantly, put systems and practices in place so the same problems do not keep happening. Work with engineers to harden successful prototypes, improving deployment, observability, reliability, security and operational readiness as products mature. Challenge architecture and infrastructure choices when there is a simpler or more effective approach. Improve the team’s DevOps practices continuously, identifying friction and removing it before it slows product development. What You Bring Strong hands-on experience building and operating cloud infrastructure, ideally on GCP. Solid experience designing and implementing CI/CD pipelines for modern software applications. Practical Kubernetes experience, including deploying, configuring and troubleshooting applications in containerised environments. Experience managing development, test and production-like environments in a repeatable way. Strong understanding of secrets management, configuration management and secure deployment practices. A track record of taking loosely defined infrastructure requirements and turning them into practical, maintainable solutions. The ability to troubleshoot complex cloud and deployment problems independently. Strong engineering judgement. You know when to build something robustly, when to keep things deliberately simple, and when infrastructure is becoming more complicated than the problem requires. A collaborative mindset. You enjoy working directly with software engineers, ML engineers, product managers and other technical specialists rather than operating as a separate infrastructure function. The confidence to bring your own ideas to the table, challenge assumptions constructively and take ownership of problems through to resolution. Comfort working in a fast-moving product discovery environment where not every requirement will be known upfront. Nice to Have Infrastructure-as-code experience with tools such as Terraform. Experience with GKE and other GCP services commonly used to build modern cloud-native applications. Experience supporting AI or machine-learning workloads, including environments that integrate with platforms such as Vertex AI. Experience building shared internal platforms or developer tooling that make engineering teams more productive. Experience taking prototypes or proof-of-concepts and hardening them into reliable deployable products. Familiarity with observability tooling and establishing useful logging, monitoring and alerting practices. Experience working in telecoms, network automation or other technically complex environments. Inclusion & Diversity at Zinkworks At Zinkworks, we are deeply committed to fostering a culture of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. We believe that our strength lies in the unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences of our team members. By embracing an inclusive environment, we empower innovation and collaboration across all levels of our organisation. Based in Ireland, we are proud to support and engage with our local communities through meaningful initiatives that promote equity and opportunity. Our commitment extends beyond the workplace, as we actively contribute to creating a more inclusive and connected society for all.